LONDON — WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange must be extradited to Sweden to face accusations of sexual abuse, a British court ordered Thursday. Assange immediately said he would appeal the decision.
Judge Howard Riddle took just more than an hour to issue a dismissal of the defense team’s arguments that ranged from technical points to suggestions that Assange would not receive a fair trial in Sweden and might even face extradition to the United States, imprisonment at the Guantanamo Bay, Cuba, prison and death.
The judge said Assange might have been “deliberately avoiding interrogation” when he left Sweden in September amid allegations by two women in Stockholm that he had sexually abused them. Under Sweden’s sexual-crimes laws, he is accused of two counts of sexual molestation, one count of unlawful coercion and one count of rape. His accusers, both WikiLeaks volunteers, have said their sexual encounters with Assange started out as consensual but turned nonconsensual.
Under the circumstances, Riddle said, Swedish prosecutors had every right to issue an arrest warrant in December demanding his return.
Outside the court, Assange, a 39-year-old Australian, described the decision as “a rubber-stamping process” and reiterated his determination to fight the decision.
The verdict signals a new phase in a battle in the British courts and the media against what Assange, his legal team and his celebrity supportershave painted as a conspiracy to stop WikiLeaks from exposing government and corporate secrets.
The case has been waged against the backdrop of the group’s highest-profile operation yet: the release of a quarter-million confidential American diplomatic cables that became the basis of articles by news organizations worldwide, including The New York Times.
WikiLeaks supporters initially mobbed courthouses over the course of six acrimonious hearings, chanting, “We love you, Julian,” when Assange was denied bail and briefly jailed in December after refusing a judge’s request to provide an address. At the hearing Thursday, their number had dwindled to about a dozen.
Assange has said the accusations are “incredible lies” and that Swedish officials, including the country’s prime minister, have created a “toxic” atmosphere that precludes justice for him.
The long and costly legal battle seems likely to continue for several more months, with Assange essentially confined to the country house of a wealthy friend as a condition of his bail.
Since the accusations surfaced, many of his closest colleagues have left WikiLeaks, and a dozen of them formeda rival website, OpenLeaks. The U.S. Justice Department, meanwhile, has subpoenaed Assange’s Twitter account as part of an investigation that could lead to espionage charges.
WikiLeaks has continued to post classified U.S. diplomatic cables from the cache it obtained. Documents concerning the opulent lifestyle of the family of former President Zine El Abidine Ben Ali of Tunisia were widely disseminated during the revolution that ousted Ben Ali and started a wave of protests in the Arab world.
Assange has told friends in Britain that he feared that extradition to Sweden would be merely the first step toward prosecution on American soil for his work with WikiLeaks. But a former colleague said inan interview that he thought Assange’s concerns were more immediate.
The colleague, Daniel Domscheit-Berg, one of the OpenLeaks founders, told reporters last week that when Assange first heard about the sexual-abuse allegations in late August, “he was not concerned about the United States.”
If Assange’s appeals fail and he is returned to Sweden, the country’s procedures will not allow him bail, and he will probably be jailed in the city of Gothenburg, the British court was told.
If convicted, he could receive a maximum sentence of four years.
Information for this article was contributed from Paris by Richard Berry of The New York Times.
Front Section, Pages 4 on 02/25/2011